The Price Is Right Behind Youhttp://mil.ooo
by Milo PriceFri, 04 Aug 2017 06:02:23 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.1120840745SPaaShttp://mil.ooo/2017/06/05/spaas/
http://mil.ooo/2017/06/05/spaas/#respondTue, 06 Jun 2017 04:01:35 +0000http://mil.ooo/?p=135One function that some companies serve that I think is underacknowledged is creating Schelling points. Schelling points, or focal points, are an idea from game theory where one of a set of choices stands out enough that an individual person can be confident that other people might pick it too, without having communicated with each other, if there’s some benefit to having made the same choice. From Wikipedia:

Consider a simple example: two people unable to communicate with each other are each shown a panel of four squares and asked to select one; if and only if they both select the same one, they will each receive a prize. Three of the squares are blue and one is red. Assuming they each know nothing about the other player, but that they each do want to win the prize, then they will, reasonably, both choose the red square. Of course, the red square is not in a sense a better square; they could win by both choosing any square. And it is only the “right” square to select if a player can be sure that the other player has selected it; but by hypothesis neither can. However, it is the most salient and notable square, so—lacking any other one—most people will choose it, and this will in fact (often) work.

It can be tricky to create a focal point in real life because it’s not quite the same thing as making something that appeals to people—it’s making something that people think will be selected by other people, or possibly even something that people think that other people will think will be selected by other people, and so on. This is arguably how most advertising works: the goal is less to convince you (personally) that you’re buying something good, and more to convince you that other people will understand what you’re buying to be good, or to at least understand what message you’re trying to send with it. When this is successful, your personal opinion of of the company stops being relevant for the purposes of susceptibility. From the linked post, which I recommend reading:

For each of these products, an ad campaign seeds everyone with a basic image or message. Then it simply steps back and waits — not for its emotional message to take root and grow within your brain, but rather for your social instincts to take over, and for you to decide to use the product (or not) based on whether you’re comfortable with the kind of cultural signals its brand image allows you to send.

It’s the same idea as common knowledge—even if you know a product is good, and everyone else knows it’s good, there’s an additional benefit if everyone knows that it’s good and everyone knows that everyone knows it’s good: you can invest in the product without explicitly coordinating with other people.

Having this quality can make a product significantly more valuable than could be guessed by its performance alone. This is basically what the Console Wars are fought over: not which game console is the most powerful (which would be relatively easy to settle) but which console is the best gathering point: where players can predict that developers will release good games, and where developers can predict that they’ll have an audience of players. Factors like graphical power clearly help a console become a focal point, but so do features like included control types, cost of manufacturing games, exclusive series, and online multiplayer—all of these benefit the owners of a console, even those who don’t personally use them, because other players will. Consoles that have failed have almost exclusively done so because they didn’t manage to become a focal point, whether because they attempted a surprise launch (the Sega Saturn) or because they were too niche (the Ouya).

I think this is most of what Apple does at this point. Once their focus changed from actual innovation to refinement, they became an efficient producer of focal points. When Apple Pay came out in 2014, the ability to pay for things with just your phone suddenly became a huge national talking point, even though it was only possible due to the phone payment terminals created for use with Android phones in 2011. They weren’t creating new functionality, but by making it a thing-that-all-iPhones-do, they were making it something that users could trust developers to support, and that developers could trust users to use. This is also what happened with the Apple Watch, which spawned dozens of mainstream thinkpieces about “what is a smartwatch good for?” a full year after Android Wear was released, and two years after the Pebble. Today they announced the HomePod, which appears to be an attempt to move the “Amazon Echo But By A Smartphone Company” focal point away from Google’s version.

This also seems to be what Google is trying to do with the Pixel phone: as a platform, it’s a clearer focal point when there are more first-party exclusives packed in, compared to the Nexus line, which was more of an all-around decent-quality reference model. This is also a perceived benefit for users of platforms like Android Auto: just by being associated with a big name, the platform is a better investment than whatever crappy OEM UI a car would come with otherwise.

]]>http://mil.ooo/2017/06/05/spaas/feed/0135Three things the Pebble did betterhttp://mil.ooo/2017/01/08/three-things-the-pebble-did-better/
http://mil.ooo/2017/01/08/three-things-the-pebble-did-better/#respondMon, 09 Jan 2017 01:01:10 +0000http://mil.ooo/?p=117As some of you know, I was (and am) a big fan of Pebble smartwatches. Sadly, they shut down last month and stopped development on their then-upcoming next generation of watch: the Pebble Time 2. I backed the Kickstarter, so I was pretty bummed to hear that it wasn’t going to come out.* I’ve owned three smartwatches, the original Pebble, the Moto 360, and the Pebble Time, and there are some things that Pebble just does better than the other mainstream smartwatches out there.

1) Battery life

One problem that smartwatches may always suffer from is battery life shorter than that of conventional watches, which are simply less complicated and don’t contain a radio transmitter. Assuming relatively consistent power use and battery size, Wired calculates that powering even a low-powered smartwatch with motion (as some mechanical watches use) would take roughly one full arm swing every 3-4 waking seconds.

Android Wear watches and the later Apple Watch seem to compromise at about one day’s worth of battery life, depending on the model, which seems to me like the bare minimum for usability. Most people charge their phones overnight, and it makes sense to charge your watch overnight as well, but it means one more charger to carry with you if you ever travel or sleep somewhere other than your own house. Pebble, on the other hand, lasts 7-10 days on a charge, in large part due to its low-power screen. This is very, very useful and means that your watch is usually one less thing to worry about.

2) Screen

This one is probably more controversial, but I think that e-paper is an almost strictly better screen format for wearables than traditional LCDs. It only has to redraw when a row of pixels changes, so that for an average watchface, it only has to update the screen every minute. This saves a ton of power, and lets the display stay on 24/7, as opposed to LCD smartwatches, which usually dim or turn black when not in use and still only last a day or so. It’s hard to quantify, but it’s very useful to be able to glance at your watch without having to move or tap your wrist, which is a bit of a nuisance and probably a turnoff for prospective smartwatch owners.

E-paper is also more visible in brighter (e.g. outdoor) light, while LCDs are the opposite. Unfortunately, Pebble’s contrast is decreased somewhat on the color models as opposed to the black and white models, but it’s still head and shoulders above LCD displays when outside. It also means that if you’re wearing your watch in a dark room, you’re not constantly emitting light whenever you rotate your wrist (I’m looking at you, theatergoers).

Pebble’s UI also has stylized, vector-art-by-way-of-pixels icons for common apps, which I think are pretty cool.

The main tradeoff here is that the color palette and framerate are more restricted on e-paper screens. This would make it a bad choice for, say, a smartphone, but I think the use cases of a smartwatch don’t intersect with those of a smartphone enough to make it a big deal. For example, you’d be restricted from making a very good web browser on the Pebble compared to what you could have on, say, Android Wear, but I don’t know if I’ve ever wanted to browse the web on my watch for any reason other than a proof-of-concept. Usually I just want to read notifications and news on my watch, not look at high-fidelity visual content.

3) Buttons

This is probably where I’m going to lose most of you, but hear me out. The Pebble doesn’t have a touchscreen, and I think this works better than having one. For the vast majority of my use of the Moto 360, my interactions consisted of:

Flicking notifications right

Flicking notifications up

Flicking notifications down

Flicking notifications left

Voice commands

What controls does the Pebble Time have?

A right (“confirm”) button

An up button

A down button

A left (“cancel”) button

A microphone

The advantage here is that with physical buttons, everything costs less attention. If you get a notification you don’t care about, you press ‘left’ and you know it’s gone because you pressed the button–you don’t need to keep looking at the watch while you swipe it away. If you’re listening to music, you can control it without even looking at your watch, since you know you just have to press ‘right’. The buttons will never accidentally be pressed by a wet sleeve or by brushing your hand across your wrist.

Again, for a smartphone, an all-purpose touchscreen is generally the best design solution for the problem of supporting different applications’ controls. But on a watch, nothing I usually want to do requires controls more complex than up, down, select, go back, and text entry. This does preclude the use of some features, like some games or drawing emoji, but I don’t need to do those from my watch. For me, playing games on a watch is like playing Snake on an old feature phone–there’s not much reason to do it unless you’re otherwise very bored, and you can already play Snake with buttons, so it’s sort of a moot point.

The future

So far, Fitbit hasn’t announced whether they plan to use Pebble’s IP or hardware designs (which they bought along with the company) in any future products. Generally, though, I think smartwatch manufacturers could learn from Pebble’s example**–that you don’t need to put a smartphone UI on a watch to have it do what you need. Pessimistically, this seems unlikely to change anytime soon, for the same reason Amazon doesn’t make color e-paper Kindles–not because the technology doesn’t exist, but because LED and smartphone controls (as with the Kindle Fire) are “good enough” for color content for most people. However, now that there’s no longer a mainstream, cheap, long-lasting smartwatch option, more manufacturers might start moving into that space. Either that, or the market further divides into “expensive smartphone-watches” and “cheap activity trackers”.

* Thankfully, all Kickstarter backers got refunds, which is more than most failed Kickstarters can say and is a great show of good faith on Pebble’s part. Reportedly, this was part of the terms of Fitbit’s acquisition.

** Er, not the going out of business part.

]]>http://mil.ooo/2017/01/08/three-things-the-pebble-did-better/feed/0117A brief history of emojihttp://mil.ooo/2016/12/05/a-brief-history-of-emoji/
http://mil.ooo/2016/12/05/a-brief-history-of-emoji/#respondMon, 05 Dec 2016 15:52:02 +0000http://mil.ooo/?p=60Emoji are some of pop culture’s best-known characters, appearing in countless texts, and slated for an upcoming movie. But do you know their full history? Read on!

Early origins

Emoji (plural of Italian emoje, lit. “artificial head”) first appeared on the scene in the 1960s, with the invention of the “smiley head”. Heads had appeared in visual media for at least hundreds of years already,[1] but before 1963, no one had yet attempted to depict a jaundiced head without a nose.[2] While early critics were worried about the recognizability of the “smiley head” as a smiling human, these concerns were proven largely unfounded by the accompanying slogan: “It’s me, a human face!” Its cumbersome original title, the “Facsimile Head”, was soon shortened to the more-pronounceable “Smiley”.

No one knows who created it or why.

A popular t-shirt from the 1960s

Later 20th century

Two of IBM’s original emoji

As computers became increasingly popular, fledgling company Մᑨ℅ძⅇ(later Unicode) began research into a way to insert Smiley as one of the 128 characters included in ASCII (also released in 1963) as an “easter egg” of sorts. However, miniaturization had not yet progressed to the point where it was feasible to contain an entire human head in a single computer. It wasn’t until technology firm Italia Byte Mappings (IBM) extended ASCII by adding another “character shelf” that Smiley made his first true digital debut. IBM named this character “Emoje” to avoid potential copyright issues.

During the 1980s, IBM suffered huge profit losses with the introduction of a video game starring an unlicensed imitation of Emoje: Pac-Man. As a result, they opted to remove the character from their operating systems for the next few decades.

Other media

Smiley became a popular figure in comics and film.[3] After a number of appearances in superhero comics, Smiley was controversially “killed off” in the opening sequence of Zach Snyder’s 1986 film Watchmen (later adapted into a graphic novel by Alan Moore). However, due to a later comic depicting a flashback of Smiley explaining to himself, “It’s a good thing I wore my bulletproof vest this morning,” Smiley was once again considered canonically alive.[4]

This wider recognition eventually resulted in Smiley becoming the official mascot of retail chain Wal-Mart.

An injured Wal-Mart logo falls out a window

21st century

With the advent of instant messaging (IM), Emoje once more entered the popular awareness. New advances in technology allowed Emoje to not just be represented as his original smiling self (☺), but dozens of other faces, including a frowning face ( :~( ), a cool face ( B-) ) , and a clown face ( *<:o) ). These varied faces became known as “emoji”, and research by Unicode discovered hundreds more,[5] with the help of plucky youngsters sent out into the field to capture and catalog emoji.

Apple’s risky move

It was around this time that Apple decided to get into the business of emoji. Inspired by a pop-up ad offering him a download of free smileys, then-CEO Steve Jobs led an initiative at telephone company Apple to include similar free smileys with every phone. The strategic and financial challenges were enormous: how would Apple produce all of these emoji and leave their phones at their traditionally low price point? How would users feel if all those times that they typed out “cool” were rendered obsolete by the introduction of ““?

A new lease on life

Fortunately for Apple, a solution presented itself. With Microsoft’s support for Windows Vista nearing its end, the other tech giant was left with millions of surplus Vista Start Buttons from dismantled or unproduced inventory. Sensing an opportunity, Jobs struck a deal with a then-17-year-old Bill Gates to purchase the unused Start Button material and use it to manufacture each Apple emoje. These became an instant success and were for some time a major selling point of Apple’s telephones.

Upcycling

Not to be outdone, Google and Microsoft decided to create their own emoji to be included with their own respective mobile OSes. However, since Apple had already bought all the start buttons, they used some construction paper instead to save on costs.

Emoji and social impact

In the past few years, emoji have been used to weigh in on a number of social issues.

EXAMPLES:

Apple bravely ignored Unicode specification and made all of their human emoji white, rather than the yellow of most platforms, in order to better represent their user base.

Oxford Dictionaries’ 2015 Word of the Year was Unicode character point U+1F602 TEARS OF JOY (). This popular word beat out several close competitors, including U+1F686 TRAIN (), U+1F574 MAN IN BUSINESS SUIT LEVITATING (), and U+2279 NEITHER GREATER-THAN NOR LESS-THAN (≹).

Apple saw that some OSes were making all of their emoji white, argued that this was exclusionary, and bravely lobbied Unicode to amend the standard and make emoji available in each of six skin tones. There was no simpler solution to this problem.

In 2016, the presence of emoji led many people to read and share fake news online, a terrible practice.

Apple ended gun violence in 2016 by changing their gun emoji to a squirt gun.

The future of emoji

Anything could happen in the future for emoji. Maybe there will be a self-driving car emoji or something. Really, the sky’s the limit.

THE END

[1] Example
[2] The first Lego minifigures weren’t produced until 1978.
[3] Attempts to introduce the Smiley Head into literature largely failed at the time, largely due to cultural blowback at the insertion of “:-)” into text. While this was viewed at the time as fairly amateurish, one cultural critic noted in 1985 that, while “you guys aren’t ready for that yet […] your kids are gonna love it.”
[4] The Death of Smiley, DC Comics, 1992
[5] Eventually, enough emoji were found that a new language was formed. Known as UTF8, its linguistic roots were based on earlier dead languages such as Latin-1. UTF8’s name is a reference to the Tower of Babel, an earlier attempt to unite all human languages, and as such is short for “Unwisely Tempting F8”.

]]>http://mil.ooo/2016/12/05/a-brief-history-of-emoji/feed/060Moving hosts, new urlhttp://mil.ooo/2016/02/01/moving-hosts-new-url/
http://mil.ooo/2016/02/01/moving-hosts-new-url/#commentsMon, 01 Feb 2016 15:51:41 +0000http://mil.ooo/?p=55Just switched to a new host and moved all content over from a backup. It looks like everything carried over, but let me know if anything seems to be missing. Also, I’m switching to mil.ooo as the primary url of this site (it’s trendy, but I like it).
]]>http://mil.ooo/2016/02/01/moving-hosts-new-url/feed/155The Prisoner’s Dilemma: the only way to win is not to placatehttp://mil.ooo/2015/06/08/the-only-way-to-win-is-not-to-placate/
http://mil.ooo/2015/06/08/the-only-way-to-win-is-not-to-placate/#respondMon, 08 Jun 2015 05:13:58 +0000http://www.miloprice.com/?p=53I first encountered the Prisoner’s Dilemma in a middle school seminar, where it was presented as a morality problem. Do you potentially doom your unknown partner in order to improve your own odds? After seeing it presented with a similar framing soon afterward in Knights of the Old Republic, and as a case of social dynamics in Roger Highfield’s The Science of Harry Potter, I figured it was just a moral dilemma in the sense of questions like “do you let yourself die to save someone else?” and didn’t think of it much afterward.

The next time I encountered the Prisoner’s Dilemma was many years later, in an essay about how the Prisoner’s Dilemma should decidedly not be viewed as a moral issue in the traditional sense. You’re supposed to think of your partner either as someone entirely morally irrelevant, or assume that any bad karma points that you would get for defecting are reflected in the payout. Viewed this way, the problem is still at least as interesting.

Meanwhile, I was taking a microeconomics class, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma was introduced as an illustration of the idea of a Nash equilibrium (named after mathematician John Nash, who died last week). This was the first time I’d really grasped the paradoxical nature of the situation–no matter what your opponent does, you’re better off defecting, but at the same time, both players defecting is a preventably bad outcome. Without any sort of coordinating force, the most stable outcome manifests in a state that’s bad for everyone, one that no one would consciously choose given that a better one exists, but one that is very hard to get out of.

Around the same time, I ran into the problem in real life–this time in my college dorm.

I had a roommate who liked to watch TV at his desk with the speakers on, and while he was in our room, he would usually be watching TV. I, meanwhile, tended to play video games at my desk while wearing headphones (I didn’t own a TV, man). The headphones got uncomfortable after a while, and I would have preferred to play with my speakers on instead. However, if I did this, both of our sounds would partially block out the other’s, instead of just his blocking out mine. This would have been a better state of affairs, but I didn’t want to get into a battle of going back and forth raising our respective volumes forever.

I realized that this sort of worked as a version of the Prisoner’s’ Dilemma:

Headphones

Speakers

Headphones

Decent outcome

Bad outcome, good outcome

Speakers

Good outcome, bad outcome

Bad-ish outcome

In retrospect, it probably would have made sense to start “defecting” once in a while, and not use my headphones–since this was an iterated version of the game, he might have gotten the hint and started using headphones himself. (Or I could have just said something, I guess.)

The dynamics of this scenario also change when you assume that the headphones are partially noise-blocking. Under these conditions, everyone using speakers at once is less preferable than you using headphones, even though they’re still uncomfortable and you’d rather use speakers. The payoff matrix for this version of the situation looks like the one for Chicken:

Headphones

Speakers

Headphones

Decent outcome

Bad outcome, good outcome

Speakers

Good outcome, bad outcome

Worst outcome

Both players would prefer not to yield, but the worst outcome occurs when neither yields. This version may actually have been closer to the actual scenario, since I had these big ol’ over-the-ear heapdhones, and filling our room with a cacophony of American Dad combined with Uncharted 3 might have been more annoying than just having to hear one in the background of the other.

I may add more scenarios with similar models as I think of them; hat tip to Stephen for the title.

]]>http://mil.ooo/2015/06/08/the-only-way-to-win-is-not-to-placate/feed/053New URLhttp://mil.ooo/2015/05/02/new-url/
http://mil.ooo/2015/05/02/new-url/#respondSat, 02 May 2015 22:54:11 +0000http://www.miloprice.com/?p=48I’m now the proud owner of http://mil.ooo/ and plan to have it redirect here, which is very handy if you’re low on space, short on time, or a very slow typist. miloprice.com will still be the canonical url for this site for the time being, though.
]]>http://mil.ooo/2015/05/02/new-url/feed/048Review: Return of the Jedi Radio Drama (1996)http://mil.ooo/2015/04/02/review-return-of-the-jedi-radio-drama-1996/
http://mil.ooo/2015/04/02/review-return-of-the-jedi-radio-drama-1996/#respondThu, 02 Apr 2015 17:45:41 +0000http://www.miloprice.com/?p=32Rounding out the trilogy of Star Wars radio dramas is Return of the Jedi, released in 1996, over ten years after both the film itself and the previous radio drama in the series, The Empire Strikes Back.

The largest departure from the other two radio adaptations is that Mark Hamill doesn’t return to reprise his role as Luke, although Joshua Fardon, the replacement actor, does a decent job. Most of the other actors reprise their roles from the other radio dramas, except for Billy Dee Williams as Lando. Somehow, the actor who plays the Emperor manages to make him even more hammy and scenery-chewing than in the film; this is a good thing.

ROTJ:TRD is also remarkably short; it has just six half-hour episodes, for three hours of total runtime, compared to 6 1/2 and 5 for ANH:TRD and TESB:TRD, respectively. I can only recall a handful of added scenes, although those that were there were generally good–there’s a scene between Han, Leia, and Lando as the Falcon leaves Tatooine, for instance, that adds some camaraderie and character interaction to the main characters’ reunion. Other scenes improved somewhat in the move to audio; characters explaining things to a blinded Han Solo made the exposition seem more natural, and C-3PO’s recounting of the events of the Star Wars trilogy to the Ewoks takes on meta-level significance when presented as part of an audio-only production.

Dash Rendar, Shadows of the Empire’s replacement for Han Solo. Not to be confused with Cable from X-Men.

References to the Expanded Universe are surprisingly numerous, particularly to Shadows of the Empire. SOTE was a multimedia marketing initiative that Lucas Licensing was doing around this time, telling a story (I say “a” story rather than “the” story, since, in my opinion, little of it seems to follow directly from the plots of the films) between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, a time period previously only explored by the quasi-canon Marvel comics. The Nintendo 64 game is probably the best-known part of the campaign, but there were also a novel, a comic, and even a soundtrack for the novel that told different aspects of the story. As a result, the ROTJ radio drama reflects this and includes a scene from the novel (Luke making his second lightsaber) and some references to other events (Han is incredulous that they let C-3PO fly the Falcon on “Corus-cant” [the radio drama’s pronunciation]). Mara Jade also makes a surreptitious appearance as a dancer in Jabba’s Palace, as established in the Thrawn trilogy of novels. Overall, the references are nice easter eggs that wouldn’t detract from the casual listener’s experience or even probably be noticed, although I did notice at least one odd continuity issue–the narrator refers to “decades” of conflict between the Rebellion and the Empire, when it’s probably more like one decade max, even according to the material available at the time.

I did, however, miss some of the expanded interactions between characters like Vader and Imperial officers, or among the rebels, as was found in the other two adaptations. In fact, it seems like Vader’s hardly in this one, showing up only for his movie scenes where he tells officers about the Emperor in a couple short lines (as well as, of course, his role at the Emperor’s side). I suspect that much of the reason for this version’s shorter length is that Return of the Jedi uses even more visual exposition than The Empire Strikes Back, shortening much of the audible interaction. According to Wookieepedia, there were also some funding issues that led to the delay of the creation of the radio drama, which may also have limited the scope and ambition of the project. The ultimate effect of all this, though, is to leave the final chapter of the saga (well, final at the time) slightly underwhelming.

Despite these issues, ROTJ:TRD is worth listening to and rounds out the original trilogy radio dramas with a relative sense of grace.

]]>http://mil.ooo/2015/04/02/review-return-of-the-jedi-radio-drama-1996/feed/032Review: The Empire Strikes Back Radio Drama (1983)http://mil.ooo/2015/03/15/review-the-empire-strikes-back-radio-drama-1983/
http://mil.ooo/2015/03/15/review-the-empire-strikes-back-radio-drama-1983/#respondSun, 15 Mar 2015 20:50:59 +0000http://www.miloprice.com/?p=25After my recent listen-through of the Star Wars NPR Radio Drama, I was eager to listen to the corresponding drama for The Empire Strikes Back. Considered by many (including myself) to be the best of the series, TESB improves upon the original movie in many ways. Listening to it, two things soon became apparent.

The first is that TESB is a much more visual film than ANH, in the sense that there are more scenes where the viewer is expected to be able to tell what’s going on just from the visuals. This is likely a combination of the change in directors between films and the fact that it’s a sequel, so the audience already knows about the characters and setting to a greater extent. But whatever the reason, the indirect result is that the radio adaptation suffers for it to some degree. Scenarios like Luke being trapped in the Wampa’s cave can be conveyed easily enough through soliloquy, but the frequent location changes of the Cloud City arc end up being harder to follow.

The second is that the adaptation of TESB sticks much more closely to the script than does the adaptation of ANH. It opens with an original scene of Rebel X-wings being destroyed by TIE fighters, and Princess Leia reacting to the news, but this was one of only a couple new scenes, the rest mostly taking place among the Rebels on Hoth. There are some expanded exchanges–between Lando and Boba Fett, for example–but on the whole, not much changes. There is a nice new bit of continuity that heavily implies that Luke found Dagobah through the Force itself, but I haven’t seen this idea referenced anywhere else.

The voice acting this time around isn’t overly remarkable. Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels, and Billy Dee Williams all return to reprise their roles as Luke, C-3PO, and Lando, respectively. Yoda is voiced by John Lithgow, who somehow manages to make him sound even more like a Muppet. Listening to the asteroid field chase scene did end up being very entertaining to listen to while driving, as the cast reacted to unseen obstacles and TIE fighters.

Overall, I wouldn’t consider this one required listening to quite the same degree as the adaptation of ANH, but it’s still a perfectly serviceable take on The Empire Strikes Back and worth a listen if you liked the first one.

]]>http://mil.ooo/2015/03/15/review-the-empire-strikes-back-radio-drama-1983/feed/025Game Over Return of Fanonhttp://mil.ooo/2015/03/14/game-over-return-of-fanon/
http://mil.ooo/2015/03/14/game-over-return-of-fanon/#respondSat, 14 Mar 2015 18:37:24 +0000http://www.miloprice.com/?p=17If you’ve ever visited a wiki site other than Wikipedia, it was probably run by Wikia, a site that allows anyone to create and run their own full Wikipedia-style site, for good or for ill. Perhaps their best-known spinoff is Wookieepedia, a Star Wars wiki that is by far the most complete and comprehensive source of Star Wars information outside of Lucasfilm itself, with 117,811 articles as of this writing. And it’s not just huge, lore-filled franchises either; Wikia’s 335,281 (and counting) communities range from a Wallace and Gromit wiki, to a wiki for the Oscars, to a wiki about buffalo nickels. “The 1913 Type 1 (or variety 1) Buffalo Nickel is the first pereoid of 1913,” proclaims this wiki. “This video may also tell you bits and pieses of the 1913 type 1 Buffalo Nickel.”

(fun fact: while looking through the Wikia movies hub I found an inexplicable description of/advertisement for a condo community in Florida that some confused soul had thought would be a good addition to a wiki about movie wikis)

But, like any content-focused Internet community that combines enthusiasm, the ability of anyone whomsoever to join, and a complete lack of moderation of any sort, Wikia gets more and more perplexing the deeper you go in. Take, for example, the fanon wikis.

Fanon (a portmanteau of “fan” and “canon”) is any material that fans of something create that, while not part of officially licensed canon, nonetheless is “true” in some sense to its creators. It sometimes takes the form of simple “headcanon” inferences about characters. More often it’s full-blown fanfiction, derivative stories about the characters in a work. And then there’s whatever the heck is going on with fanon wikis.

In this spirit, I am proud to announce my co-founding of the Chess Fanon Wiki. Here, users can unleash their inner creativity and share with the world the new rules for Chess that they’ve made up. Go, and create a work of everlasting value.

]]>http://mil.ooo/2015/03/14/game-over-return-of-fanon/feed/017Review: NPR Star Wars radio drama (1981)http://mil.ooo/2015/03/05/review-npr-star-wars-radio-drama-1981/
http://mil.ooo/2015/03/05/review-npr-star-wars-radio-drama-1981/#respondThu, 05 Mar 2015 20:29:16 +0000http://www.miloprice.com/?p=10I’ve had to do more driving than usual lately, so I’ve been on the lookout for good listening material to keep my mind occupied while going back and forth along scenic Interstate 5. So far, my weapon of choice has been podcasts (my latest favorite is the incomparable Citation Needed), but something I’d always been curious about was the radio dramatization of Star Wars that NPR produced in the early 80s. I love CBS Mystery Theater-type audio entertainment and, of course, Star Wars, and I kept seeing information from the radio version used to answer long-standing fan questions, so it seemed like a good thing to dive into. I wasn’t disappointed.

The first thing you might notice is that it’s long–6 1/2 hours in thirteen parts, to be precise, counting interstitial material like recaps and end credits. Since the original movie is only a bit over two hours, this long-format approach allows for nearly every scene from the movie to be expanded with additional dialogue and characterization. It takes three episodes, an hour and a half of runtime, before the action even catches up to the beginning of the film. A deleted scene with Luke and his friends makes up the first episode, while the next two are about Princess Leia learning about the Death Star and setting in motion her attempt to get the plans to “General Kenobi” on Tatooine.

The expanded script allows for a lot more character motivation to shine through, and integrates nearly flawlessly with the original lines. C-3PO’s opening line “Did you hear that? They’ve shut down the main reactor” now fits in with action from the previous few minutes, and Captain Antilles, the Rebel who gets physically strangled by Vader, has an expanded role as well. Biggs’ death (er, spoilers) is significantly more meaningful when presented in the context of his and Luke’s friendship, and Luke’s joy at meeting him again on Yavin 4. There are now scenes for many previously offscreen moments, like Obi-Wan and Luke haggling to sell the landspeeder, Obi-Wan teaching Luke about the Force on the Millennium Falcon before Han walks in, Vader’s interrogation of Leia on board the Death Star, and more.

Remarkably, the additional details fit very well with the later-established Expanded Universe (now “Legends“) and even prequel-based continuity. There are even little continuity fixes, like Luke now saying “This R5 unit has a bad motivator!” because, technically, it’s an R5 rather than R2 unit. The only glaring discrepancy I noticed was that Obi-Wan describes Vader as being “one of” his pupils, but it’s not too hard to retcon given that he was lying in that conversation anyway. I suspect that the writers of the radio drama benefited a lot from writing after The Empire Strikes Back came out, which gave more of a sense of how things worked in the galaxy, what the Emperor was like, and just how accurate Obi-Wan’s story to Luke about what happened to his father was. In fact, there’s a second scene (set on the Falcon) where Luke asks again about his father, and Obi-Wan says there will be time for all that later, even just a few lines after talking about how spacers play holochess to while away the endless hours in hyperspace. (Sort of hilariously, after Luke reacts to seeing the full hologram of Leia by remarking that “she’s beautiful”, Obi-Wan responds by agreeing, which is… odd in light of Return of the Jedi‘s revelations.)

I really enjoyed the voice acting as well. In what might be his first of many voice roles, Mark Hamill returns as Luke, along with Anthony Daniels as C-3PO, lending an air of auditory legitimacy to the production. The rest of the cast plays their parts well, and there’s a certain classic, campy sensibility in the dialogue. It would be easy to just deliver the lines exactly as in the movie (i.e., the versions you hear in your head when you read lines like “what have you done with those plans” or “aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?”) but instead they’re given a fresh take. If you know the lines to an unhealthy degree like me, you may be bothered by minor things like Greedo’s lines being out of order, but most won’t notice.

I highly recommend listening to this if you’re even a little bit of a Star Wars fan, and I’m personally looking forward to listening to the adaptations of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.